Ben Kafka
Assistant Professor
Department of Media, Culture, and Communication - New York University
About:
Ben Kafka is a historian of Europe with interests in writing, printing, paperwork, grammatology, and psychoanalysis. His articles and essays have appeared in Representations, Book History, Bookforum, and Cabinet. His first book, The Demon of Writing: The French Revolution in Paperwork, will be published by Zone Books (MIT Press). He has started a book on the history of graphology.
Within NYU, he is associated with the Department of History, affiliated with the Department of French, and a fellow of the New York Institute for the Humanities. He teaches courses on the history of the book, media archaeology, and problems of interpretation.
Beyond NYU, he has been a member of the Princeton Society of Fellows (2004-06) and the School of Social Science of the Institute for Advanced Study (2009-10). He is a founding editor of the journal History of the Present and serves on the advisory board of the Feminist Theory Papers archive at the Pembroke Center for Teaching and Research on Women at Brown University. He also occasionally writes about psychoanalysis at Tussis Nervosa .
He received his B.A. in Modern Culture and Media from Brown University and his Ph.D. in History from Stanford University.